Huawei subsidiary Honor is on a roll in India. And it has been keeping very busy. The brand has launched as many as six phones in India in the last six months: that’s one phone launched every month. More importantly, it now has at least one good phone in almost every product category, in the country. Budget (under Rs 10,000), mid-tier (under Rs 20,000) and premium flagship (over Rs 30,000): Honor has them all covered. For a company that’s relatively new in India, that’s a big thing actually. “We’ve been in India for almost three years now. We’re quite young. This adds an advantage to us because we can behave like a start-up,” Suhail Tariq who is CMO for consumer business group at Huawei India tells India Today Tech, on the sidelines of the company’s latest product launch.

“The (huge) number of launches that we’ve done in the last six months is just because of the fact that we’re young, we’re small, and therefore we are able to move very fast. We’re more flexible as far as the kind of products that we need to bring into the market is concerned,” Tariq adds.

Honor has launched not one, but two new budget phones in India: Honor 7A and Honor 7C. While the Honor 7A has been launched in India for Rs 8,999, the Honor 7C has been launched at a starting price of Rs 9,999 going all the way to Rs 11,999. Honor has launched a phone under Rs 10,000 after a long, long time which makes the Honor 7A kind of interesting. The Honor 7C, is however, a little hard to understand. Especially its top-end version. Honor already has a perfectly viable Honor 9 Lite and Honor 7X in the Rs 10,000-Rs 15,000 price category.

6 PHONES IN 6 MONTHS

Self-cannibalism is a common phenomenon among Chinese brands. Almost every Chinese brand, from Xiaomi to Lenovo, has a tendency to launch multiple devices with very similar hardware at around very similar price points. It comes as little surprise then that even Honor is doing that. There is a method to this madness, however, if Honor is to be gone by.

“Every phone in our portfolio offers something unique, which means consumers can pick up a device according to their specific needs.”

Which is right in a way. The Honor 9 Lite offers a glass sandwich design and four cameras: two on the front and two one the back. The Honor 7X has a full-metal body. The Honor 7C, similarly, comes with its own set of features. While I am still not too sure about the top-end version, the base model — that costs under Rs 10,000 — does hit the sweet spot and is something that should clearly be on the mind of buyers looking to buy a phone on a budget.

Honor now has at least one good phone in almost every product category in India
“Some (consumers) want glass body, some want metal unibody, some want four cameras. It’s then that two phones (although priced similarly) start to look very different,” Tariq says. “If you see from the price perspective, yes there’s some overlap. But from where we see it, we want to understand what consumers are looking for (and then make sure we have something for everybody),” he adds.

Whatever be the case, Honor is clear about a couple of things, as far as launching a new phone in the market is concerned. Design and cameras are a major focus for the company, and “this is where they’ll keep moving.”

ONLINE TO OFFLINE

Honor was an online-only brand when it began its operations. It is still primarily an online-only brand. But over the years, it has embraced the offline market as well. This means you can now buy Honor phones at physical retail stores. Not all of them, but at least, some of them. “We don’t completely follow the online-only strategy (any more). We have an online to offline strategy (now),” Tariq says.

The strategy that Honor has deployed is different from Xiaomi’s. You can say that Xiaomi’s is a little more complex. Xiaomi has a three pronged strategy that it calls O2O which translates to Online to Offline and vice versa. Through O2O, Xiaomi directs traffic from its online channels such as Mi.com to its offline channels (Mi Home stores, Mi Preferred Partner stores and others), which in turn direct the traffic back to Mi.com depending on product availability.

Design and cameras are a major focus for Honor, and “this is where they’ll keep moving”
Honor is keeping things simple. At least for now. “We initially launched the Honor 9 Lite online, and then there was so much demand that we introduced the 64GB version offline. We have a bend of staying online first but there’s an offline strategy also. We have a lot of devices available offline.”

But not every Honor product is available offline. Only the products that “generate great heat online” reserve the spot.

The Honor 9 Lite has been special, according to the company. It has witnessed great demand. And it has changed perceptions. “The Honor 9 Lite has opened the doors for a lot of female consumers that were never opened to us before. Previously we were looked upon as a very male dominated kind of a phone brand. The glamour and gloss that has come courtesy the Honor 9 Lite has changed things” Tariq quibs.

On a more serious note, Honor still has a lot of work to do especially when it’s eyeing to become one among the top three smartphone brands in India. It can surely learn a thing or two from Xiaomi but at least, Honor has its basics right which is nice. “We’re working on an efficient and sustainable model. We’re not in a hurry of getting the market share very quickly.”

Pricing its products ‘honestly’ is part of that model. Honor phones are generally cheaper in India than they are in China, and that’s a conscious decision on the part of Honor. “Our pricing is such that makes sense for the Indian audience,” Tariq says, adding that even though pricing may be a differentiating factor (between India and China), “there’s no change is the quality and DNA that they’re operating on.”